ABOUT ME: In college I had literally eight different professors (I counted) who explained the prisoner’s dilemma like we had...
ABOUT ME: In college I had literally eight different professors (I counted) who explained the prisoner’s dilemma like we had never heard it before and were about to be initiated into some mind-blowing secret known only to a select elite.
The same thing happened to me with Kuhn. I think I must have had it assigned at least five different times.
I was once talking to a film major about this very subject and I asked her if there was an equivalent in her department, some masterpiece that every professor thought relevant to their course. She thought for a moment and replied, “Die Hard.”
“Die Hard?”
“Yeah, with Bruce Willis? Everyone makes us watch it.”
in art history it’s “art in the age of mechanical reproduction.”
In math it’s Cantor and Godel and logical paradoxes, etc.
In philosophy, it’s Descartes, Hume, the social contract, and Kant, who each of my professors had a completely different interpretation of.
In American Studies it was the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the fact that theater audiences were traditionally expected to be loud and boisterous.